Apparently there was a mistake when we tried paying our USAA bill and instead of $100, it attempted to draft $10,000 from our checking to the USAA investment account. We are leaving at 5 AM tomorrow morning and we found this out around 8 PM in the evening tonight when we logged in to our checking account and found it overdrawn. This is a problem because we hadn’t taken out the cash for our trip yet, and we plan on using public transportation, which requires cash.

Yay for WAMU 🙂
The lady who answered the phone at our bank (WAMU) was very nice and helpful. She stopped payment on the $10,000 but said it would take 2 business days for the account to kind of “get right” again. They also refunded the insufficient funds charge we had received, since this was a mistake. I got confused as to what was up with the account overall, but she said if USAA called WAMU and/or stopped trying to draft the amount, it would clear up and we could take out money again.

Boo to USAA 🙁
USAA was not as helpful. They said they couldn’t stop payment on the charge because it was after 5 PM and all the managers who have the power to do that sort of thing were gone until Monday. We explained that we are leaving in the morning and we need access to our checking account and they basically said “sorry”. We called them back a second time and they changed the story a little and said the charge had already stopped itself. We were not sure which to believe.

It gets dumber
So, we can see from WAMU online that our account still shows our correct available balance. We decide to drive to the ATM and see if we can take out cash anyway. We drive to the WAMU ATM and IT EATS OUR CARD!! We call WAMU again and they can see the amount it tried to take out and I think they put it back. They said we could pick up the card from the branch tomorrow morning but of course we can’t, because we are leaving at 5 AM. Oh well, WAMU issues a new card in the mail but now we are down one card and only have mine left. We are too afraid to try the ATM again for fear we’ll lose both cards.

The outcome…
We end up going to 2 separate CVS Pharmacys and buying a toothbrush at one and some Kleenex at the other with the debit card so we could get the maximum cash back on each transaction. Hooray, this works! And it only took like 3 or 4 hours and a bunch of stress.

On that note, see you next week! Will log on from the hostel computers if we have access…